Field of the Invention
The invention relates to social media networks, search engines, and methods for crowdsourcing, aggregating, and storing information to assist users in forming reasoned and well-informed beliefs.
Discussion of Prior Art
Humans have very limited cognitive capacity, with the average individual's working memory being capable of processing approximately, seven units of information at a time. In addition, without repetition and/or attempts to retain new information, it is theorized that the average human forgets approximately 40 percent of new information within nineteen minutes, 55 percent within one hour, and 75 percent within two days.
While a person's inability to process and retain new information is not new, this limitation has become a significantly greater issue in today's data and information driven world. In particular, this inability for humans to process and subsequently retain information makes it very difficult to develop well-formed and carefully deliberated beliefs. Instead, most people's opinions more closely resemble emotional convictions rather than informed and reasoned beliefs, and the few reasons that people pull from their memory to support those opinions are often little more than rationalizations for how they already feel.
Furthermore, when an individual deliberates about issues, the few thoughts that he or she recalls from long-term memory are systematically biased by affect. As a result, people tend to reject arguments and evidence that do not comport with their initial feelings regardless of how valid those arguments and evidence may be. In short, the average person is plagued by an uncontrollable, emotionally driven tendency to engage in motivated reasoning.
The format that information typically comes in, for example, articles, television segments, books, radio programming, etc., also makes it very difficult to be deliberative in forming beliefs, as people tend to read and listen passively—and there is no easy way to compare, contrast, and synthesize arguments made across different sources and even different mediums. As a result, the arguments and evidence to which individuals are exposed, and potentially store in memory, are arbitrary at best and systematically biased at worst. Modern technology, and the Internet in particular, exacerbate these problems by radically increasing the amount of information available on virtually any topic.
What is needed, therefore, is a method of organizing data, storing data, and searching that data in a manner that helps people consider arguments from all relevant perspectives and form beliefs rooted in evidence.